This invention involves the management of processes and their related data. Specifically, the invention involves using lifecycle and user role information to control the implementation of processes and their related data.
The specification and deployment of business processes and operations is crucial to the successful management of medium or large-scale enterprises. Business Entities provide a basis for specifying business operations that combines data and process at a fundamental level.
Business Entities are business-relevant dynamic conceptual objects that are created, evolved, and (typically) archived as they pass through the operations of an enterprise. A Business Entity includes both an information model for data about the business objects during their lifetime and a lifecycle model, which may describe the possible ways and timings that tasks can be invoked and performed on these objects. An example of a Business Entity type is Courier Shipment, whose information model would include attributes for package ID, sender, recipient, shipping method, arrival times, delivery time, and billing information. The lifecycle model would include the multiple ways that the package could be delivered and paid for, and would be used in tracking each instance of the Courier Shipment Business Entity type. Other examples of Business Entities are a Claim in an Insurance Claims process, going through the states of Filed, Approved, Fulfilled, and so on; Trouble Ticket for a Services Delivery process, going through the lifecycle states of Opened, Assigned, Rejected; financial Deal in a loan-giving organization, going through the lifecycle states of Draft, Offered, Signed, Active, and so on.
Business Entities define a useful way to understand and track business operations, such as the locations that the package has passed through and its arrival times, and the distribution of timings (for example, how many two-day air shipments took longer than two days in the last week) and ways of handling (for example, what percentage of cash-on-delivery shipments required more than one delivery attempt), which are useful for monitoring, dashboards, and more broadly, business intelligence. More generally, Business Entity types can provide a unifying basis for understanding many aspects around the operations of an enterprise, including requirements gathering, business rules, compliance, and process user interactions.